INTERACTIVE ART
COURSE EXHIBITION

Feb 19-26, 2021

Galleries V1 and V2
Experimental Studio (Room G203)

Väre Building
Aalto University
Otaniementie 14
Espoo, Finland

Due to Covid-19 restrictions, the exhibition is open only to students and staff of Aalto during the opening hours of the building.


Cross Waves is a sea state that occurs when two or more nonparallel wave systems meet. The waves generated by this phenomenon are dangerous to swimmers, boats, and ships caught between the crossing waves.

Cross Waves is also the name of the Spring exhibition of Aalto Media Lab students. It is an exhibition that presents interactive artworks that have been created in the meeting point of art and technology.

Ristiaallokko | Cross Waves exhibition is the outcome of the Interactive Art course at the Aalto Media Lab at Aalto University. The aim of the course is to explore the notion of interaction within the context of new media art.



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RISTIAALLOKKO | CROSS WAVES 2021



The past couple hundred years have seen the effects of humanity on nature unfold at an extraordinary rate and scale. The harsh and aggressive motion of the world we live in shattered the appearance of the earth’s untouched nature. But can nature prevail over the intrusion of men and remain unruptured despite the ever growing interference? Can it eventually retract back to its original form?

The Nature of Elasticity is an audio-visual installation that touches upon the problem of the Anthropocene. The immersive generative soundscape and the interactive visual representation of the issue transform the room into a riveting experience, while submerging the visitor in the centre of the action.

Photographs used for the visuals are the work of Lassi Häkkinen.




KIKO(QI) CHEN

Cracked Words



Internet Censorship has changed the way we write, read, access, and produce information. This website is a free tool that assists you to bypass the “watching eyes” and express freely on the Internet - that’s how the Internet should be.

This piece was inspired by a mass internet anti-censorship movement across Chinese social media. A series of algorithms were created to disrupt the words in a way that is still readable to humans, but can bypass the “optical character recognition” AI censors.

In the beginning of COVID, an interview article about a Wuhan whistleblower doctor being disciplined on charges of “spreading rumors” went viral on Chinese social media, shortly before wiped out by internet censors. In response to it, Chinese netizens resorted to hundreds of interesting ways to save this article from vanishing, by rewriting it in calligraphy, flipping it upside down, filling it with emojis, translating it into fictional languages, and then sharing it in a relay.

“Words can be wiped out, but thoughts and memories will remain.”

Please join to be a part of this exhibition and leave your message on the screen!




AMEYA CHIKRAMANE

The Window


“The Window” is a new media art installation project that tries to imitate and expand upon the simple common experience of perspective – the line-of-sight of a viewer's vision. The artwork tries to evoke the sense of peering through an orifice, such as a port-hole or a window, and how what is seen through it moves or changes based on the perspective from which it is being viewed.

Photo by Clint McKoy on Unsplash




Is there memory embedded in textiles? Visual and tactile codes communicate stories, while steins, odours and wrinkles are marks of their lives, showcasing its relation with the body and the environment. Thus, reflection on the past is enabled by these cues. But what if those memories could be dynamic, shape shifting and adaptive to emotions, touch or the human voice? Could textiles transform into a new media for our digital archives, permitting recollection and access to these hidden memories? Could we reach a point where we trust our clothes memories more than our experiences? This installation explores how we can code and decode memories into a soft material, transforming memories into a new light base language.


Would you like to transfer a memory?




LASSI HÄKKINEN

Teeth


Is it our memories that make us who we are?

Teeth is a work about time. The time, which goes on and makes memories. Eventually it is that same time that will make everything fade away. Faded memories become disconnected fragments instead of being something whole and familiar. They are pieces of an identity puzzle and little by little putting them together becomes harder and harder. Until finally the time is up.

Teeth is a video installation in the form of an extraction of a living room of somebody's grandparents. An old TV and a sofa chair, a fragment of a memory. There are four channels on the TV and one identity spread somewhere across them.




Music and sound have been essential tools for me to communicate and reflect ideas, thoughts and feelings that are sometimes difficult to put into words. During the first year in Media Lab I was attracted by all the possibilities to try and learn and I slowly started to take the visual and multimedia tools alongside my music to expand the possibilities to interact and communicate. The second year I focused mainly on anything else but sound studies and slowly started to shape the idea of developing a multimedia live set. This audiovisual moment is a collage of skills, ideas and experiments from the past COVID year in Aalto. It is also a learning diary and an initial try-out for my master thesis. But for the most part it is pure flow, self expression, reflecting the world in 2021 and sending positive vibes back to all the co-students and teachers in Aalto.

The performance will be streamed via Twitch. https://www.twitch.tv/ikola_1



PHUONG NGUYEN

Oto no iro


Interaction is interesting because of its human element. Emotion is what makes humans human. Through interaction, humans enable emotions. Oto no iro (Color of Sound) is an experimental medium for human expression, combining sounds and visuals which are tools that humans have used to express emotion and imagination since ancient times.




It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
William Styron

Getting people to talk about mental illness is not always easy. Мой дорогой друг, (My dear friend,) is a collection of story fragments that examines and questions the treatment of mental illness. The installation invites you to participate and continue the narrative by sharing your own stories.

Мой дорогой друг, (My dear friend,) I miss you.




ALEXEY NIKOLAYEV

The Balance of Nature



In this piece I’m trying to show nature as a balanced harmonious system that a human is invited to contemplate or play with. However, one is not allowed to break the equilibrium. In contrast, nature can share this equilibrium as a gift of inner balance and beauty with a human, and it’s especially precious in current turbulent and often stressful times.

I believe that biological systems are much more complex than anything that humans ever created, and if we take care about nature, it can be our teacher and guardian, both physically and mentally.

By waving both hands to one side of the body (left or right) a visitor can affect seeds or spores dispersal and thus future locations of mushrooms and plants. These slight interactions can’t hurt the system but invite visitors to play, communicate and actively observe. Beyond seeding phases no interaction is possible, but visitors are offered to enjoy the beauty of the sunny day and observe this slow-paced small world without everyday rush.

The idea of balance is shown through a stable environment with a constant number of species, and also through endless cycles of growth, life and rebirth.




Come closer, calm down and relax.

Look at it, touch it, feel the texture, temperature, activate your sensation, enjoy and have a nice journey.

I have been experiencing an addiction to viewing ASMR related content on social media and the internet. ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensation Meridian Respond. It is a term to describe a physical sensation, and there are many different ways to describe it, for instance, a feeling of deep calm, or a sense of satisfaction, a mellow feeling. Almost every evening, the last thing I will do to put myself to sleep is to watch some food eating videos or squeezing object visual content.

Weird Phenomenon, Strange Sensation is an interdisciplinary experimental project that explores the inspiring connection among new technologies, internet intimacy, a strange internet phenomenon, contemporary art, and modern design. It pushes the boundary of and challenges the traditional graphic design, visual art, creative creation process and to rethink the potential of new media art, contemporary graphic design, and visual art in today's Scenario.

This interactive installation relates to several themes, such as:

  • Loneliness issues in the internet age
  • Strange internet phenomenon: ASMR addiction
  • Sensation and relaxation
  • internet intimacy
  • Human-computer interaction
  • Tangible user interface (TUI)

The choice of the touch sensory material and visual content are inspired by the ASMR video content, for example, mukbang video, slime satisfying videos, bubble wrap pressing videos, etc.

Related project: The Pillow Project




JASMINE XIE

Miss(ed) Chimera



Miss(ed) Chimera occupies the intersection of exceptional identities, circumventing the ordinary human and thereby slipping by the conditionals of humanity to create a super, non-human being. Paying homage to the ‘magical girl’ genre, Miss(ed) Chimera possesses in her transformed state a hyper-girly, hyper-cutesy appearance with heart motifs throughout her outfit. Simultaneously, she hints at a distancing from humanity, with occasional unsettling shadows under her skirt, hidden eyes, and a void where her ‘heart’ should be, triggered by recognition from the human (inter)actor. While she may pass for a ‘magical girl’, endowed with special powers to save others, others who know what they are looking for can detect the other aspect of her identity.

Miss(ed) Chimera is a project centered on the concept of ‘passing’ and ‘flagging’ - ‘passing’ for one set of identities, while ‘flagging’ as one’s true set of identities. She passes as an ‘acceptable’ ‘abnormality’ - the magical girl of Japanese media, the hero protagonist distinguished by her magical powers - but can signal her more interior identity, that of a monstrous, non-human chimera, by triggering the light effects that make aspects of the monstrosity visible, thereby ‘flagging’ to others who know what to look for that she too is Other, as they may also be. The ordinary viewer may never be treated to the glimpse of the Other, and may be satisfied by her passing for special, but not monstrous, but should a similarly Othered being approach, she can alert and create the connection of mutual understanding between the Othered interactor and herself.